War that's worth the wait

Supreme Commander's lead designer says the game will deliver an intergalactic war on a spectacular scale - you can zoom from the heat of battle to a distant tactical overview and deploy your resources quickly

Technology Guardian: Why do you think a real-time strategy game of this scale has never been attempted?

Chris Taylor: I think it's partly due to the technical challenges and partly due to following trends in the market. I also think it's important that the design matches the scale - the Supreme Commander concept is specifically designed to work well inside a huge "theatre of war".

TG: Has the RTS genre become stagnant? Is there anything or anyone you'd blame for its downfall?

CT: Not in public. Seriously, I blame myself for not getting off my arse and working on Supreme Commander sooner.

TG: Did the loss of the Total Annihilation licence have anything to do with those delays?

CT: Losing the licence actually helped the game's design process. I can't wait to start exposing all the details on the backstory and the bizarre characters and histories we have developed.

TG: Explain some of them. What about the game's opposing factions? Were there any real-world influences behind them?

CT: There are three factions: The United Earth Federation - UEF - the Aeon Illuminate, and the Cybran Nation. Each faction centres itself on different core philosophical and ideological beliefs. The UEF is where many players will immediately be comfortable, because the values are very popular "Earth" values - the military is modelled to reflect this. The Cybran, on the other hand, are struggling for galactic independence, and the Aeon are on a mission to kill both the Cybrans and the UEF. I got a lot of inspiration from many different sources when designing these factions - I've read and studied a lot about the second world war, and I've read a lot of science fiction that covered future civilisations. Asimov is a leading favourite. Supreme Commander's almost a serious look into what motivates people to fight wars ... But I should stop there!

TG: What do you think the ability to zoom out to a "strategic" scale does to traditional RTS gameplay?

CT: We allow the player to zoom out well beyond a tactical scale to what we call a strategic "theatre of war". We think that this allows for a powerful visualisation of the entire theatre, which, in turn, makes command and control of large armies possible and also allows the player to really stay on top of every aspect of their war effort. It's, quite frankly, the key to allowing the players to experience the game at a much more strategic level than ever before.

CT: We definitely don't follow that model, because it doesn't fit well with a full-on combat simulation. Instead, the game units are balanced by considering firepower, turret traversal speeds, unit speed - including acceleration, max speed, and turning rates - and reload times, to name a few. The rock-paper-scissors system is a holdover from pen-and-paper war gaming, and although it was a great system to adopt in early computer games, we now have enough processing power to do it in a way that is much more similar to real life.

TG: What will base building and micromanagement in Supreme Commander entail? Is it a focus?

CT: Base building includes unit factories, defensive infrastructure, resource collection and storage, and intelligence gathering systems. It's a very important part of the game, but plays a support role to the combat aspects of the game.

TG: You mentioned "resource collection". What resources will players have to accumulate in the game?

CT: Well, I'm not a fan of big, complex, resource models, and my goal is to focus the player on the front lines of battle, not on the details of resource gathering. To accomplish that, players only have to locate "mass" - which is really a combination of all the raw materials necessary to create a game unit - and "energy", which is required to power weapons and keep the player's base fully functional.

TG: Screenshots of Supreme Commander in action reveal units that are much bigger than anything else on the battlefield. What do "giant" units, in general, offer to the RTS genre?

CT: Our experimental units are what take the game from being huge and awesome to crazy and over-the-top. It's what makes you want to rub your hands together like a mad scientist and say, "Wait till they see this thing!" Our goal is to not just get people excited about the whole game, but about each unit individually.

TG: And finally, do you think Supreme Commander is shaping out to be better than Total Annihilation?

CT: I'd love to leave that question for you to answer when I sit you down in front of Supreme Commander.

Interview by Alexander Gambotto-Burke

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